the man who made the talking boards speak

For
140 years after Easter Island was discovered by the outside
world, some of its most remarkable treasures remained unnoticed.
These treasures were the talking boards  wooden
tablets like the one pictured on the right  each covered
with characters of an unknown language. The Brother Eugene Eyraud.
When he spotted them in the 1860s, he found that the islanders
had been using these irreplaceable keys to their history for
firewood. With their leaders kidnapped or killed by slavers
from South America, they had nobody to decipher the script.

Scholars
were keenly interested in Brother Eyrands find, for the
boards were the first examples of a written native language
that had been found anywhere in the South Sea islands. But by
the time the salvage campaign got under way only a pitifully
small number were left: just 21 tablets, and a handful of other
artefacts with inscriptions.

As
the years passed, linguists puzzled over the boards. At first,
some dismissed the marks as cloth-printing designs  pretty
but meaningless. Others tried to link them with the picture
writing of a tribe of Panamanian Indians, with rock paintings
of Australian aborigines, with Egyptian hieroglyphics, even
with 4,000-year-old inscriptions in the Indus Valley in India
and Pakistan. None found the answer.

Then
in 1953, a German scholar, Thomas Barthel, took up the challenge.
He reasoned that since the script contained about 120 symbols
combined into more than 1,000 signs  far more than would
be needed for an alphabetic or syllabic system  each sign
must stand for a complete word or idea. But he still needed
some key to get him started. He found it by following a clue
from the previous century: the story of an early Easter Island
investigator, the French Bishop Tepano Jaussen. The bishop was
known to have found on Tahiti an Easter Islander who had been
trained in his youth as a professional chanter  a rongorongo
man.

The
story went that the man, Metoro Tauara, had been able to chant
songs from four of the boards the bishop had collected. The
bishop had noted each song in Polynesian and then found, to
his dismay, that Metoros translations made no sense at
all.

Barthel
suspected that Metoro had guessed at some of the symbols, rather
as a choirboy will guess at the words in a complicated piece
of church music, but that he did know at least some of the island
script. So he tracked jaussens notebook from Tahiti to
France, Belgium and Italy, discovering it finally in a monastery
near Rome. Those lines of Polynesian syllables in Jaussens
shaky hand, he wrote later became my Rosetta Stone
. Ill never forget the moment when the first textual
fragments began to make sense.

By
1960, Barthel had begun publishing his translations  showing
the boards to contain mostly prayers to gods, instructions to
priests, and accounts of island mythology. But there are too
few boards to be absolutely sure, and some of Barthels
translations have been rejected by other experts.

Nevertheless,
Barthel believes that here is enough evidence to show that the
writing was developed by Polynesian wanderers.

Only
21 talking board tablets like this one survived
the collapse of Easter Islands culture. In this form of
writing, each line turns back on the one before like the furrows
in a ploughed field. Other writing of this type has been found
in the Pacific, from Sumatra to the Marquesas Islands.